


By Any Means Necessary (Trial and Error Remix)

by Unforgotten



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Break It, Dark, First Meetings, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Remix, Separations, Time Travel, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-16 21:02:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4640100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Charles' untimely death in the dark future, Magneto goes back instead of Logan—but no matter what he does to try to change the past, he can never seem to change himself. In the end, there's only one option left, and he's more than ruthless enough to take it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. three

**Author's Note:**

  * For [helens78](https://archiveofourown.org/users/helens78/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Where There Are Still Gods](https://archiveofourown.org/works/381772) by [helens78](https://archiveofourown.org/users/helens78/pseuds/helens78). 



> Thanks so much to Red for the literal millions of word sprints, without which I would never have finished this, on time or otherwise. Thanks also to helens78 for writing the original fic, which I love to pieces; I had SO much fun reimagining that scenario.

The third time Magneto went back, it was to the beach. If he had been able to mend nothing from a later date, then perhaps he could still mend this, their first parting. If Erik were never driven to leave Charles today, if they went forward together rather than apart...it might be enough. There was nowhere else for Magneto to go, after today, not any when that mattered. It would have to be enough.

The minute he arrived, he knew it wasn't going to be enough. Before he came, he'd known that he was likely to arrive after the bullet, rather than before—that if he ever tried to go back to a specific moment on a specific day, he was likely to be drawn to the most powerful moment of that day, regardless of his intention. So it wasn't surprising that he arrived on his knees in the sand, just in time to look down at Charles and hear him say—

"Oh, my friend. I'm sorry, but we do not."

A lifetime ago, those words had wounded Magneto badly. He'd spent far too many years obsessing over them whenever he and Charles were fighting. He'd obsessed over them even more when they weren't speaking. They'd served as proof, whenever he'd needed it, of Charles' rejection—proof that it wasn't worth it to even considering bending.

Minutes ago, Magneto had still thought he could turn it around, even if this was one of the top three moments of his life he'd most prefer not to have to relive. He'd come here so that he and Charles could have the rational discussion, here in this moment, that they hadn't managed for fifty-odd years in that other life (not until one night in their bed at the Iowa safehouse, one of the many times they'd made confessions to one another that had always seemed unthinkable in the past).

But now that he was here, nothing about this moment was as he had remembered it. He was sweating, that hideous flight suit sticking to him everywhere. The sun was in his eyes, the sand in his mouth, Charles heavier in his arms than he had recalled, a dead weight. And the way he was looking at Magneto was...his eyes were glassy, his breathing shallow, and even if he was blotchy and red instead of pale, the signs were clear enough: Charles was going into shock.

There would be no rational discussion, no mending. Not in the three hours Magneto had. He didn't know how he ever could have thought otherwise.

"I'm so sorry, Charles," he said. He looked up at the others, milling around like uncertain children. "We need to get him to a hospital," he said. "Azazel, you'll take us."

Azazel did, with less argument than the last time. Meaning with no argument at all—at this stage of things, all of Shaw's former cohorts had all been too stunned to question new leadership. That had changed— _would_ change—but it was what Magneto needed in this moment, and it got them to the waiting room at what Charles had once told him was one of the best and oldest trauma centers in the US. 

By the time the medical people were swarming around them, the only conversation Magneto and Charles had managed to have was for Charles to say he couldn't feel his legs, and for Magneto to say, "I know." So much for mending.

Charles wouldn't be out of surgery before Magneto was pulled back to the new present, whatever it ended up being this time. Nonetheless, he chose to stay in the waiting room with Charles' people, rather than leaving when Azazel, Janos, and Angel did. He planted himself in a plastic hospital chair and remained there until something occurred to him, a nagging anxiety which wouldn't leave him alone until he had wandered out to sweep the entryway and front hall for any sign of one of those hateful mutant detection devices. They were never metal—humanity had learned slowly, but in the end had learned well—but Magneto had long since learned how to sniff them out regardless.

The senile old man act which got him behind the receptionist's counter left the woman in question looking rather confused (in retrospect, he ought to have flirted his way back, a strategy which had worked wonders for him the first time he'd been thirty-two), but Magneto satisfied that there was nothing here to be concerned about. There had never been going to be, of course. This was 1962, decades before humankind had learned enough of mutants to go to war against their existence. This was 1962, and to the doctors and nurses here, Charles was only a man with a spinal injury in need of medical care, not a mutant threat best eliminated while he was weak. This was 1962, and Charles was a rich white man being treated at one of the best hospitals of the era. This was 1962, and the greatest danger here was the limit of 1960s medicine—but Charles had survived that well enough the first time around, and would survive it again.

After locating the restroom the receptionist had given him directions to in order to make the ruse look genuine, Magneto returned to his seat. Havok glanced at him briefly; Banshee didn't. The Beast and MacTaggert were nowhere to be seen, which was to the best—the former in his blue form would raise alarm, where the latter had always raised Magneto's hackles. 

No one spoke. The minutes passed, one after the other in uneven succession—slowly, when Magneto thought of Charles under the surgeon's scalpel; quickly, when he thought of how little time he had left here, and that all of it would be wasted. By the time Mystique—by the time Raven sat down across from him, red-eyed and miserable, the device on Magneto's wrist claimed he had six minutes remaining.

He hadn't come here intending to speak to anything but Charles...but in another life, this woman had been his right hand. Magneto regarded her now and wished he had the time to explain what had happened, to seek her counsel. The Mystique he'd known would have laughed in his face, for it had ended badly between them, and he had been to blame; he wondered how Raven's reaction would differ, here and now.

But there was no time.

"How are _you_ , my dear?" Magneto asked. Raven had already announced to the room that the doctors wouldn't be able to tell them anything about Charles for some hours; this, Magneto kept to a lower volume, between the two of them. It was a question he never would have asked her in that other life, not in relation to this. They had both left Charles today, both been complicit, both far too defensive to ever discuss what had happened on the beach.

"I'm okay, I guess." 

She clearly wasn't, or she'd have alerted to any of the signs that he wasn't the Erik she knew, even if she hadn't had the first idea what they meant. But never mind that. Magneto reached out, squeezed her hands, and said, "Be strong. And be careful." If he'd thought of it earlier, he might have written it down for her, all the things she ought to be wary of. He might have at least given her a better pep talk (known to some as his "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" talk, if only because Charles had never properly appreciated Magneto's metaphors). But the colored spots were closing in from the sides of his vision, and there was no time. He stood. "I'm going to go find the coffee. I'll be back shortly."

He spotted the coffee cart a little ways down the hall. By the time he came abreast of it, he could barely make out its outline. By the time he was two steps beyond it, he couldn't make out anything. And then he was falling. And then he was gone.

***

Magneto came to as he had twice before: Suddenly, with all the memories of a life he hadn't lived lurking beneath the surface, ready and waiting to drag him back under. This time, he was back in the workroom at the back of the Blackbird, where all of this had begun, with Hank—with whom it had begun—looking at him with an expression of concern.

"Erik, are you all right? You look like you're about to faint," Hank said. The disapproval was evident in his voice, the way it had been for the past three weeks they'd been working on the device, every time he thought Magneto wasn't eating properly or sleeping properly or grieving appropriately, as if there was any time to waste on anything that wasn't their work. "Maybe we should wait until tomorrow to test it."

"—I'm fine," Magneto said, trying to wrap his head around a world where the Beast called him Erik. Where he himself thought of the Beast as Hank. Where they were evidently longtime friends instead of reluctant allies...all because Erik and Raven hadn't left Charles on the beach. They'd stayed for only a few months, but those months hadn't been enough to change any of the big events of the past sixty years. Magneto had come back to a present which nearly mirrored the first life he remembered, all of the large events the same, with a few minor, mostly aesthetic changes.

Magneto had still been wrongly imprisoned beneath the Pentagon for fifteen years for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Mystique had still been captured, tortured, experimented on. Those experiments had still resulted in vastly improved Sentinels, which had still wiped out ninety-nine percent of mutants on Earth, at last count. Charles had still died twenty-three days ago. All of the important things, everything he'd set out to change—all of that had remained the same, except that Magneto and Hank McCoy were _friends_. "We haven't tested it yet?"

Hank's expression became sharper, piercing. "No," he said slowly. "We were just about to."

As Magneto thought back, sifting through the new set of memories as he had done twice before, he found that this was true. While they had finished the time traveling device today, just as they had in the original timeline, the work had been more companionable, the two of them more likely to get distracted by conversation, and had thus been finished a few minutes later than it had been before.

Magneto looked down at the device, thoughtful. It resembled a wristwatch more closely than anything else—but the face showed neither the time nor date. What it showed, instead, was a blank, gray space, until the moment it was activated by the press of one of the buttons on its side. Of these buttons, there were two: one on the right side, the other on the left. On his trips thus far, Magneto had pressed the button on the right, which sent him back to his younger body on the day and at the moment (more or less) of his choosing. The button on the left, however—

"Hank," Magneto said, "explain to me again how this second button is meant to work."


	2. two

During the sixties, the Brotherhoods' headquarters had been located in an abandoned hotel in Chicago. It was the sort of building photographers would later break into for the very fine opportunity to document urban decay (an endeavor Magneto had never understood, and the joke would be on them once every city on the planet fit the same description). It was frigid in the winter, stifling in the summer, and smelled of mold all year long. Erik had hated everything about it then, and was less than delighted to arrive there now.

Everyone else was less than delighted when he found them in the dining room. Mystique and Azazel, Riptide and Angel, and, at the head of the table, Emma Frost. All turned to look at him as he walked in; none looked pleased to see him. By 1971, the year the CIA had raided this base, killing Emma outright, capturing Magneto, and scattering the others (all of whom would be captured, tortured, and, with the exception of Mystique, killed within the next few years), none of them had ever seemed pleased to see him. Back then, Magneto had often had the sense that they had just been discussing how best to depose him; now, he sensed the same thing. Well, no matter. They weren't about to mutiny in the next five minutes, not when they'd never gone through with it the last time. Three hours from now, they'd be Erik's problem again. Let him deal with it.

Uninterested in letting the presence of these ghosts deter him, Magneto didn't hesitate. "Azazel," he said crisply, "I need you to take me to the house in Westchester." No need to specify any further; they all knew exactly which house, even those of them who had never been there.

And everyone had an opinion about it, which they felt the need to express—insubordination Magneto would never have allowed in the contemporary Brotherhood. Riptide shook his head. Angel muttered, "Here we go again." Emma went snooping, and raised and eyebrow when Magneto easily repelled her attempt, having long since learned something more of blocking telepathy than he'd ever known as a young man. Mystique set her jaw and looked away, as if she didn't care; a decade from now, she'd be good enough to make Magneto actually believe it.

As for Azazel, he crossed his arms over his chest and said, "I am not a taxicab. You can take the train."

Magneto drew himself up, a motion which now came easily, but had taken him some decades to infuse with the proper authority. " _Now_ , Azazel."

Azazel, to the clear surprise of everyone at the table, complied.

***

"Get the hell out of my house," Charles said.

It wasn't quite the first thing he'd said, which had been, "What the fuck are you doing here?" closely followed by an inquiry about whether or not Raven was all right, followed by, "Then why are you _here_?" followed by, "You know what? I don't care. Get the hell out of my house."

"Have you finished?" Magneto asked, falling back on the old irony for lack of knowing how better to proceed. Not to the hostility—this much he'd known was coming in the fall of 1970, just a few months after Charles had closed the school's doors for the first time. They'd always hissed and spat at each throughout this decade, that handful of times they'd met between the beach and the Pentagon. Magneto had expected this much. He'd been braced for it, even wanted it. He'd thought it would make things easier, somehow.

"I'll be finished when you're gone," Charles countered. " _Get out_."

The hair on Magneto's arms stood on end. He more than halfway expected to find himself outside the grounds the next time he blinked, the closed gate rattling pointedly in its frame behind him. But nothing happened, and it was this that Magneto didn't know what to do with—conviction without authority, Charles Xavier without his gift. He'd come here planning to tell Charles to read his mind, all of it, knowing that no matter how angry Charles was at him, no matter what he still, in this time, believed Erik had done, he wouldn't be able to resist such an offer. He never had before.

Once Charles had seen everything, and had ten or fifteen minutes to process it, Magneto had thought they could spend the next several hours going over the finer points. Even if he'd needed to clarify a few details, they could have made the most of the time. He hadn't planned for this, but he wasn't about to let it stop him.

"I'm not leaving," Magneto said. "As for you, you're going to sit down," (and that was the other thing that had him thrown, Charles leaping from his seat on the couch when Magneto entered the room, Charles standing on his own two feet as he bade Magneto to leave; Magneto had known about the serum and its effects, but knowing it and seeing it with his own eyes were two different beasts), "and you're going to listen. We don't have much time."

They didn't; a glance at the device on his wrist told him he he just two hours remaining here. Two hours to convince Charles, to explain it all.

Charles didn't sit. He also didn't repeat his demand that Erik leave. Instead, he said, softening almost imperceptibly, the way he always had after about two minutes of standing firm, "Time for what, exactly?"

"I'm not the Erik you know. I've come from the future with a message for you."

Charles scoffed. "Oh, really. What message would that be? 'Watch out next spring, red and magenta are finally going to be in'?"

Magneto ignored this. "The war is coming—"

"Not this shit again. Save it, Erik." Charles was no longer looking at him as he sank back down onto the couch, lying long across the cushions. "You don't want to be here when Hank gets back from his errands." He slung his arm over his eyes. "In the meantime, you've interrupted my nap, so I'm going to get back to it. Give my sister my love, would you? And don't let the door hit you on your way out."

Magneto felt the old urge—to raise his voice, to make a scene, to pull Charles up off that couch and demand that he open his eyes to what was happening, what was going to happen. But he'd long since learned that softly spoken words could gain him more than harshly shouted ones, especially when it came to Charles. So, instead, he swallowed the anger for the moment, and sat down on the edge of the coffee table in front of the couch so that he was crouching by Charles' head.

How to make Charles believe? Magneto had never had to convince him of something of this magnitude with only his words. Always before the helmet had come off, so that Charles would understand all at once. "You were thirteen when you decided you wanted to open a school for other mutants. You came up with the idea because your sister couldn't go to school. Wouldn't, rather: You offered to make the teachers and other students forget any of her slips, but she still refused."

Charles' arm lifted, just enough for him to look at Magneto in all skepticism. "Did Raven tell you that?"

"You told me." Magneto had rarely discussed Charles with Mystique. He'd only discussed Mystique with Charles after her death, when they'd both been in mourning. "Fifty years from now."

Charles sighed. His arm had lowered again to hide his eyes. "Either tell me what it is you really want, or leave."

Magneto reached for Charles' wrist, drew Charles' arm toward him, away from his face. At first, Charles gave a little jerk, as if he was going to wrench himself away; then he stilled, searching Magneto's face with an uncertain expression upon his own. Charles had looked at Magneto like that a hundred times, a thousand. Before this moment, this angry young man had barely resembled the Charles Magneto had buried, but now they looked so alike that Magneto had to look away.

"I've seen these," Magneto said of Charles' track marks. "They were faded then. Barely visible. Until recently, I assumed they were souvenirs from hospital stays years ago. Lord knows you've complained often enough about nurses who can never seem to locate a vein on the first attempt." In the last few years, the bulk of this complaining had been directed toward Magneto himself, who had been so negligent as to be unable to exert the same iron control upon Charles' veins as he did upon IV needles. "I was furious when I learned about the serum. I don't believe we ever had a fight as vicious as that one." Magneto had ranted and railed, and been informed that he was projecting, and that what had been done to him against his will had no relation what Charles had done of his own free will fifty years ago—what Charles had done that had _helped_ him, he'd made very clear...although looking at young Charles now, with dark bruises under his eyes, wearing a shirt that smelled like it hadn't been washed in a month, Magneto couldn't see that this was any sort of help at all.

"That doesn't prove anything. Emma could have told you about the serum."

Magneto had nearly forgotten there was something to prove. "If I'd heard it from Emma, do you really think I'd have come here so quietly? You must know me better than that."

Charles sat up, pulling his arm out of Magneto's hands as he did so. "I'm not certain I know you at all. The Erik I thought I knew wouldn't have killed the president."

"I didn't—" Magneto said, about to launch into a heated denial—he'd resented that accusation for many years, all the more because Charles had for whatever reason refused to verify it for himself for decades—but then decided, best to leave that much for Erik to explain. "Never mind. The war is coming. Not this decade. Not even this century. But it is coming. We're going to lose. By 2020, nearly all mutants were in hiding. By 2024, nearly all mutants are dead, hunted down by Sentinels—robots created to hunt and kill mutants. Your people and mine. My friends and yours. Gone. I've come back to give you the information you need to avoid it. To end the war before it begins."

"I see," Charles said, but Magneto could see he didn't. He was still looking for the catch, trying to decide how he was being tricked. There was a part of Charles who always wanted to believe in Erik, but part of him, too, that had always doubted—not before the beach, perhaps, but ever since. "So you decided the best possible plan was to come back to talk to me when I don't want to see or hear from you? That seems sound."

"It's the backup plan," Magneto admitted. "It was supposed to be you. We meant you to be the one to come back."

"So I, what? Changed my mind? Decided you were the better choice?" The scorn in Charles' voice made it clear just how likely he thought that was.

"No. You died," Magneto heard himself saying as if from very far away. "Before we could send anyone." He waited for Charles to ask, and when he didn't: "Pneumonia, after you'd had the flu. How you caught it, I can't imagine—we'd hardly seen another person for months." He must have looked stricken, despite the control he'd always had over his expression; that was the only reason he could think of for Charles to have reached out, as if to offer comfort. "Of all the ways there are to die, you feared pneumonia the most. You told me once that you didn't mind the idea of dying on your ass, but dying on your back in some hospital bed— _that_ was completely out of the question. You would have hated it, if you'd known what was happening. If you'd been lucid enough to know."

Perhaps it was Magneto's clear grief which convinced Charles at last. Perhaps it was that he was so obviously speaking to and of a Charles who wasn't there. Maybe it was even the openness, the familiarity—the Erik of this era had been a decade away from trusting Charles enough to give away anything so personal, never mind that Charles could have plucked whatever he wanted out of the depths of Erik's mind. Whatever the reason, Charles leaned forward, the way he always had when he'd become invested in some discussion they were having (though he'd had to brace himself on the armrest when he was in his wheelchair), and he said, "Tell me more about this future."

***

Magneto told Charles everything. Bolivar Trask, Mystique, Trask Industries. Senator Kelly, the Registration Act. William Stryker, Weapon X, Dark Cerebro. The Cure and the Sentinels. Broad strokes of history, for there wasn't the time to go into the strategies he and Charles had thought up with together over the past few months. He scribbled names and dates on a notepad Charles had proffered him as he went, in case Charles' eidetic memory was related to his mutation, as Magneto suspected it might be.

He also told Charles what had happened the first time he'd gone back, and it was this that caused Charles to ask, "So how do you expect me to convince you of all of this?"

"Do you really imagine you'll have difficulty convincing me there's a war coming? I've been telling you as much since nearly the day we met."

"No, what I mean is—how am I supposed to convince you to work with me when you can't even convince yourself? What do I do if you won't listen?"

Magneto checked the device on his wrist. Eight minutes left. Not enough time to think of every action Erik might take, once he shared the knowledge this Charles now had. Little point in any case coaching Charles on how best to explain things to draw Erik into his way of thinking—Erik would see the facts for what they were, no matter how they were dressed up, and was likely to come up with his own solution, which he would carry out no matter the consequences.

"If Erik won't listen," Magneto said. "If you can't convince him. If he's determined to go his own way despite all reasoning—kill him."

" _What_?"

"Kill him," Magneto repeated, and then, though it made his skin crawl, the inside of his skull itch just to contemplate it: "Or, if you'd prefer, change his mind for him when he comes to you without the helmet." He always had, eventually. "Make him believe he's someone else. Make him believe he's not even mutant, if that's what it takes."

Charles had stopped gaping somewhere in the middle of that, and started to look offended, as he always had whenever Magneto suggested mental tampering as the solution to his problems. The more seriously Charles had contemplated that course of action himself, the more constipated he had looked, and my, did he look sour now. "I'm not going to _kill_ you. I'm not going to kill anyone. And I'm not going to— _that_ , either. It's out of the question."

"If you're going to be a fool, you'd better be a convincing one, then." Magneto was beginning to feel lightheaded, though not so much that he couldn't keep track of his argument.

"You're here," Charles said. "Out of all the places you could have gone, out of all the things you could have done, you came here, to me. That means something. And if we were allies in your time, then we can be here and now, too."

"I very much hope so," Magneto said. "We've been so much more than allies, Charles."

There was much left to say, no time left to say it in. When Magneto said, "I'm going now," Charles reached out his hand, and Magneto took it, wondering what Erik would think of this much, not to mention all the rest. Seeing the determination in Charles' eyes, he wondered if Erik might not see it and respond to it, too. Hope had never been Magneto's failing, but he found himself reaching for it, regardless.

***

Magneto woke with blood in his mouth, a salty iron taste that didn't leave when he swallowed against it. He was sitting at a kitchen table. There was a cup of coffee in front of him, which he found had long since chilled when he reached to pick it up. The lighting was distressingly dim, but when he went to open the blinds, he found that there were none, that he was looking out at a world just as dim as the one inside.

The memories he'd known within a moment that he didn't want came rushing back, one after the other after the other, so quickly and so many at once that he shouldn't have been able to follow them at all. Yet somehow he did, and it was sickeningly clear what had happened, how it had all spiraled, worse than it had in either of the other timelines.

Erik had listened to Charles, back in 1970, had taken every word to heart. He'd returned to Chicago, sent the Brotherhood out with a list of names and locations. Once he'd had confirmation that Charles' information was the truth, that every Trask Industries facility on that list both existed and experimented on mutants, his reaction had been twofold—he'd destroyed every one, and, when that was finished, put a bullet through Mystique's head.

From there, he'd faced battles on two smaller fronts as he courted all-out war against humankind—a Brotherhood outraged at his supposed betrayal, and Charles, who'd realized that killing Erik might be a viable option after all only after he'd done the unforgivable. In the end, every member of the Brotherhood had followed Mystique into the grave, and as for Charles—Magneto didn't want the memory of that day in 1983, when they'd finally come face to face again, Erik in his helmet, Charles in his chair, but it came back to him anyway. 

Erik never meant to hurt him, but Charles had had a gun. Erik had always had a kneejerk reaction when it came to guns, most especially those he couldn't feel, couldn't touch with his ability. What had happened wasn't his fault, not really. Charles should have known better. That was the way Erik justified it to himself, the way he'd justified it to himself for so many years that there was a weight behind it which nearly convinced Magneto.

Only Charles had ever been able to stop Erik, to counter him. Without Charles Xavier out there in the world, Erik had gone on in the same way he had begun. When one act of destruction didn't garner him the results he wanted, he'd commit another, on a grander scale. He kept his allies for no longer than a season, achieved everything and nothing. What did it matter that he'd stopped the Sentinel program before it ever had the chance to take off, when the culmination of his efforts had been nuclear winter? 

He'd made the wrong temporary allies in the 2010s, including a hotheaded young man named Pyro—Magneto had forgotten about him years ago; he'd never once thought to add his name to Charles' list—who had helped him to secretly acquire a number of the world's nuclear missiles, as Erik had meant them to do...and then had set them off, as he certainly had not. He'd meant to use the missiles as leverage to demand mutant rights across the globe, but what he'd gotten was World War III.

And now he was here, alone, slowly dying in a small house with what would have been a medium-sized garden in the backyard if there had been anything that could grow there. If he were to look in the mirror, he knew what he would see: a skeleton covered in blistering flesh, proof that mutants could no more survive nuclear war than humans could. They merely took longer to die. That was all.

Magneto stood by the kitchen counter for a few long minutes, looking out the window at a sooty fog which wouldn't lift for years to come. He'd have returned to his chair, but he wasn't certain he would make it—he'd never felt this weak, this fatigued. He couldn't fix this if he fell and smashed his head open on the floor—or worse, if he landed on the time travel device, shattering it and stranded himself here to whatever remained of a long, slow death.

He stayed only long enough to decide when to go back to next time. It had to be earlier than 1970. Before he'd spoken to Charles of the future, before Erik had gone haring off, never stopping to reconsider, never questioning his own actions until, again, it was far too late.

He would go back to the beginning, he decided. He would go back to the beach.


	3. one

Magneto broke into awareness with a gasp as deep as any he might have taken if he'd spent the last few minutes beneath the surface of the sea. But he wasn't in the water; he waved his hand to turn the lights on and found that he was where he had expected to be—beside Charles in the bedroom they had shared for four years in the mid-eighties. Back when Charles had thought Magneto's willingness to be domesticated might equal his willingness to bend in other matters. Back when Magneto had thought he still might bring Charles to see reason.

Charles. Magneto had known him at once by his telepathy; Charles had always reined it in while conscious, but when he was sleeping it filled the room as well as anyone who was in it with him. Magneto looked and saw that Charles was facing him, lying on his side. He was wearing his striped pajamas, the old faded blue ones which must have met the rubbish bin sometime in the next decade, for he couldn't recall ever having seen them after the close of the century. Charles of 1986 still had hair on the sides of his head in scraggly tufts; Magneto had often told him he ought to simply shave them, unless he wanted to continue looking like a fool, but Charles had held on to what little hair he had until the bitter end.

This wasn't Charles as Magneto had lost him. Magneto knew that much. But still, by the time he managed to tear himself away from the sight of Charles forty years younger, Charles well and whole, the device on his wrist showed he'd lost seven minutes out of a hundred and eighty. That was seven minutes too many, and so Magneto threw off his blanket and went over to the desk along the wall, refusing himself any more glances back at the bed. 

He found some paper and, after a few attempts, a working pen. Then, he wrote himself a letter. He had been composing it mentally for weeks—ever since he and the Beast had put the Blackbird down at the landing strip farthest away from known Sentinel activity, knowing as they had that it would never fly again. There had been no use in continuing the search, neither for Ororo and Wolverine or for Bishop's group on the other side of the globe; if they couldn't locate one adamantium skeleton in the Canadian wilderness, there was no chance at all of finding Kitty's group somewhere in Asia. Not without Charles, who had been their only remaining way to communicate long-distance without attracting Sentinels.

While he had been helping Beast dismantle Cerebro and the Blackbird's navigational system for the components they needed, he had been thinking about what he would say to his past self. Later, while he had been assisting with the delicate work which required a finer touch than any set of hands (no matter how small or how steady) could achieve, he had been thinking about what message he wanted to leave. He had long since decided which details were the most important to mention, which courses of action he should have taken as a younger man to prevent this outcome. All that was left was to write it, and so he did, page after page, scribbling it down without pause.

Half an hour into the writing, there was noise from behind him: Charles, rousing just enough to turn himself over, as he did every few hours of every night. Magneto couldn't help it then; he turned around long enough to watch this routine, so mundane and even more familiar. He'd always slept far more lightly than Charles, so this had woken him every night he'd ever slept at the mansion as well as every night they'd spent together in safe houses or the back of the Blackbird.

If Charles had so much as murmured his name, Magneto couldn't have stopped himself from climbing back into bed. He would have spooned against Charles' back, pressed his forehead against his shoulder. If Charles had awoken enough to ask what was wrong, Magneto would have told him everything. Later, he would wonder if perhaps things would have turned out differently if he had. But Charles made no sound outside of the usual fidgeting, and once he lay still again, Magneto turned back to his work. He wrote, and he wrote, and when he had ten minutes remaining, he folded up the letter, placed it in an envelope addressed to Erik Lehnsherr. This he placed in the hidden pocket of his suitcase, the one his younger self would take with him when he left Charles for the second time, some six months from now. He'd find it when unpacking in a hotel room in Barcelona, in Mendoza, in San Francisco—sometime in the next few years, he'd pull it out. He'd be intrigued. He'd wonder when he had written this, until he was a few paragraphs in and it dawned on him what, exactly, he was reading.

Then—would he believe it? Would he follow Magneto's directions? Would he go back to Charles, work together with him in the way Magneto had described, the way he and Charles had discussed nearly nightly ever since learning of what Kitty Pryde could do? Magneto had to believe that he would, and that he would wake again in the world where Charles Xavier, along with so many others, still lived.

***

When Magneto woke up in the new future, the first thing he knew was that Charles was still dead. He had died during an attack on his house six months ago, but Mystique had only recovered intelligence during her most recent mission, from which she had only returned several weeks ago. She'd passed this along to Magneto impartially, any sorrow she might have felt at the news well managed and hidden by the time she made it back to the compound.

The second thing he knew was that he was in a meeting, and meant to be telling the Brotherhood members around the table about how they were to make up for recent setbacks by destroying the factory at which seventy-five percent of Sentinels were currently made. It was a solid plan, of Mystique's design, but Magneto couldn't think clearly enough to act as the leader he apparently was in this timeline.

"Excuse me, I'm not feeling well," he said. "Mystique, if you'll continue for me..."

Magneto had never, in any timeline, invited anyone to step in for him, but he didn't bother staying around long enough to see the reaction. He went out into the hall, concrete walls and fluorescent lights he'd never seen in his life, (had seen every day for the past two years), went straight at the first fork he came to and turned left at the next. He wandered aimlessly, sorting through the new memories—how he had, indeed, found that letter, but instead of going back to Charles, had used it to further the Brotherhood's agenda. He'd laid waste to Trask Industries and Worthington Labs, destroying their facilities wherever he found them. Using his knowledge of the future, he'd gained enough of a following to pose a far greater threat than he ever had before. For the past six years, the Brotherhood had been at war with the human nations of the world, and if they were vastly outnumbered, they were also effective and deeply feared. There were far fewer Sentinels than there had been in that other life, and the Cure had only been developed three years ago, instead of twenty.

It wasn't what Magneto had wanted, what he'd been aiming for, but it was an improvement over the world he'd left in all ways except one: In this life, Charles Xavier was dead. Had died allied publicly and vehemently opposed to Erik's tactics and goals. Because Erik had never fallen, never lost his powers and his following, he had never been the one to bend, to come to Charles. Of the two of them, Charles had been the one who would never come crawling.

The Erik of this lifetime had considered his separation from Charles a necessary sacrifice. He'd been sorry to hear of Charles' death, but his momentary sorrow (and irritation, that Charles had never seen what was good for him, that he'd fought for the humans until they killed him, damn the fool...) was as nothing to Magneto's, a papercut rather than a gaping knife wound.

Magneto could stay here. He hadn't prevented the war, but perhaps he could win it yet. It wasn't out of the question that it could be won, not the way it had been before. There was a part of him that knew he should, that whispered that the war had always been coming; neither he nor Charles could ever have prevented it entirely, and the odds weren't likely to get much better than this.

He considered it until he looked down and remembered that he still had a time machine on his wrist. As Beast had predicted, it had traveled with him, connected as it was to his mental self. He wasn't bound to this future. He could go back again, to a different time and place. Instead of writing to Erik, he could speak to Charles, years earlier. It would be good to see him again.


	4. zero

The last time Magneto went back, he landed in a back alley in 1962 Miami. Thankfully, he was wearing all his clothes. Hank hadn't been sure that the device would recognize anything other than Erik's physical body, if it sent his entire body back instead of only his mind. Hank hadn't been certain of much, including Magneto's insistence—vague by necessity, as he'd already decided on his course and wanted no one to try to change his mind—that he'd tried everything he could possibly try within the three-hour time limit.

Southern Florida was just as hot and sticky in July as Magneto had recalled, the thunderstorm which blew through half an hour after he arrived was even more magnificent than he'd remembered. Thankfully, it was a typical Florida storm and passed within an hour or so, leaving Magneto with plenty of time to appropriate a motorboat. By the time the sun set, he'd been out on the water for several hours, loitering near the _Caspartina_. He'd been noticed—he'd felt Emma's cool presence skimming the outskirts of his mind several times—but not marked as a threat, just an old man in a boat with a heavy tinge of nostalgia. Perhaps she assumed he'd been a sailor as a young man. Perhaps she wasn't paying even that much attention.

Either way, it mattered little. Magneto wasn't here for her. He wasn't here for Sebastian Shaw, either. No, he was here for two young men. The first—his younger self—arrived right on schedule, leaping out of his own small boat and climbing onto the _Caspartina_ , only to be thrown back into the water from which he'd just emerged.

The rest happened quickly, so quickly, as Magneto turned his boat around, using his ability to urge it quickly to the other side of the approaching Coast Guard vessel, the side from which Charles would jump no more than a few minutes from now. He paid little attention to the explosion of light and water between the two large ships, his attention focused on the chain which Erik was sending into the air, which he knew would tear the uppermost level of the _Caspartina_ into shreds. Then, he felt what would capture Erik's attention: the submarine, detaching from the _Caspartina_ and descending, headed straight toward the Coast Guard ship. It passed directly under both the Coast Guard vessel and Magneto's small boat, and as it did, he looked not down into the water, but at the deck above.

And yes—there it was—a dark figure dashing toward the railing, vaulting over it and splashing into the water some fifteen feet away from Magneto's boat. Magneto had his own chain at the ready, sent it darting after Charles the moment he first leapt. The buttons on Charles' jacket, the eyelets of his shoes, his belt buckle gave Magneto plenty to go on once Charles was a dark shape in the water; the chain thus found Charles' waist easily, yanked him out of the ocean and deposited him on the floor in front of Magneto.

"No, no, what are you _doing_ ," Charles said when Magneto grabbed hold of him to keep him from going back over the side. "You don't understand, there's someone in the water, you have to let me—"

"Charles," Magneto said, raising his voice to be heard above Charles' thrashing and the clinking of the chain, gripping onto his arms even harder. "Look at me. _Read_ me."

Charles glanced at him, eyes wild, and while he did what Magneto was demanding from him, it must have been out of instinct more than because he'd heard or processed Magneto's words—

And the moment he felt the first brush of Charles' mind, Magneto _pushed_ , projecting all of it, everything, the past sixty years and the last three lifetimes, less a targeted missile than an uncontrolled explosion.

He'd hoped to stun Charles for ten or fifteen minutes—long enough to be certain of the rest. But Charles did him one better, and collapsed in a dead faint.

***

There had been only one answer. Magneto had begun to realize it the moment he'd told Charles to kill Erik if necessary, although like so many of his decisions over the years, he hadn't consciously realized it until it was the only option remaining.

Erik wouldn't change his mind, not without living through what Magneto had lived through, seeing what he had seen. He would always go his own way until then, a loose cannon, never pausing long enough to think that there might be a better way, and that if there wasn't a better way, he and Charles could forge one together. Erik would never learn without living it, and neither mutantkind nor the world could afford the lessons Magneto had learned.

Magneto leaned Charles against the seat, then reached into the sea with his gift, sending the submarine on its way faster even as he began to _squeeze_ —wanting Erik as desperate as possible to keep up with it, not willing to let Shaw go in the endeavor. He needed no more unknown factors. The minutes passed, one and two, and while Erik had trained himself to hold his breath, he'd never been very good at it; three, and surely his lungs must be burning by now, desperate to gasp in air; four, and if he hadn't surfaced by now then surely he wouldn't.

Magneto squeezed the submarine even harder, his hand held out over the water, fingernails digging into his palm. When the scream came—Emma's death scream, the same which had echoed through their headquarters in Chicago in another life—he squeezed all the harder, until the submarine was nothing more than a solid lump of metal, now sinking toward the ocean floor.

Sometime in the middle of this, Magneto had noticed the shouting, directed at them from the Coast Guard vessel, and had directed his boat away from the docks and into the ocean, in the same general direction the sub had gone. Now that he was no longer concerned with that, he directed the boat in a more northerly direction, picking up as much speed as he dared—he hadn't piloted many boats, and wasn't sure how much the hull would bear—until he could no longer glimpse the lights from the Coast Guard vessel.

Around the time the boat stopped, Charles groaned and began to stir; perhaps he had groaned before and Magneto had missed it due to the roar of the wind and the water. Then he jerked bolt upright, eyes wild in the glow of the lamp Magneto had just thought to light.

"Oh, my God," he said, grabbing the chain still around his waist, trying to unravel it. "I have to—he'll drown— _Erik_ —"

"He's gone, Charles."

Charles stilled. "No. That can't—we're supposed to—who are you? How do you know my name?" So asked the man who knew everyone's name, always, and he came up with the answer for himself, as he had also always done: "You're him. The man in the water. Erik. You're Erik, and you've come back to—oh, my God."

Magneto could feel Charles' mind against his again, Charles' fingers carding through his memories, one by one by one. He could have rebuffed these clumsy efforts, but allowed them out of a hope that Charles would be able to ground himself by finding the context in which to place the memories Magneto had already sent him. They'd been a jumbled lot, but as Charles looked and looked, Magneto could feel him fitting the pieces together, until he had most of the picture.

"You," Charles said thickly. Magneto had no idea when Charles had begun to weep, but his red-rimmed eyes said he must have been doing it for some minutes. "He— _what_?"

Magneto almost reached for him, but stopped himself, sure in that moment that if he did, Charles would recoil. "Charles," he said instead, minutes later, when Charles had taken a few deep breaths, gotten ahold of himself. "I didn't mean to cause you any pain."

"That's never stopped you, has it?" Charles asked in response, nearly a snarl. Along with the words came the memories, Charles' fingertip tapping them to Magneto's attention, one by one: a bullet in Charles' spine in all timelines but this; Magneto abandoning him on the beach, at the school, beneath the ground; never asking what Charles wanted, but always destroying, always taking, always leaving him worse off than he'd found him.

"Not this time," Magneto said. "You're better off now. I've saved you a great deal of trouble today."

Charles stared at him. "Really? Is that what you think?"

"Yes."

Charles must have known it too; after everything he'd just pulled up, he had to have realized that it was for the best. Yet what he said was, "As far as I can see, all you've done today is—Erik, I've only just met you, but you've already robbed me _blind_."

On the heels of this pronouncement came the rest, the other side of their coin. Their first kiss, at a rest stop somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. Their shared elation at finding other mutants, teaching them to use their powers. Their first time coming together after the beach, Erik in awe that Charles still wanted him, that he would let him. The hope, so foolish the first time Erik had gone back to Charles in the 80s, certain they could never work in the long run but giving in because they both wanted it so badly. The joy, fierce enough that it had brought him to his knees when he'd gone to the school to offer his assistance to the students there now that his powers were returning, only to be greeted by Charles, who had died in front of him three years before.

The day he'd dragged Charles out of the Iowa safehouse and down to the Clerk's Office in a nearby town. They'd had to use false names, the ones that went with the documentation they'd had at the time, but the vows had been real.

All the little victories, the dubious joys they'd had together in their years leading the resistance. The day the portable Cerebro for the Blackbird had been finished. Every time Charles had used it to direct a mutant or group of mutants to safety. Every time Erik had returned from a mission—for medical supplies, for food, for fuel for the Blackbird—to find Charles waiting for him, both as relieved to find the other safe as they'd ever been in all the years they'd been on opposite sides. All the conversations they'd had, long into the night, after learning of what Kitty Pryde could do, after having all of their past years opened to them. Now it was Magneto who was weeping. The days he'd spent at Charles' side in the end, offering comfort he was in no way certain was felt, murmuring words he was all certain weren't heard. The things he'd said, the promises he'd made later, as he'd washed Charles' hands, his feet, his body, as he'd dressed him in his only remaining suit, the same one he'd been married in—

" _Enough_ ," Magneto said, expelling this Charles from his mind, from memories he had no right to, memories which belonged to Magneto and one other, who now would never have the chance to know them. He didn't bother with gentleness, or to regret his roughness when Charles winced and rubbed at his temple.

"I'm never going to have that," Charles said, a minute later, when they'd both composed themselves. "You took it from me. You took _him_ from me."

"I did what needed to be done. I won't apologize for that."

"You never do, do you?"

Had Charles ever sounded so bitter, so biting? For the first time it occurred to Magneto that he might not be forgiven, not for this.

Toward the mainland, there was a point of light, growing larger: The approaching Coast Guard vessel.

"You should do something about that," Magneto said. "We don't want their questions."

Charles followed Magneto's gaze. "No. I suppose we don't." He raised his hand to his temple once more. "There. They're turning around."

"You should tell your sister you're all right," Magneto said. "Have her meet us somewhere."

"I already did."

"You should return to Westchester," Magneto offered, after another few minutes of silence. "To start the school."

Charles looked at him, expression bleak, weary. "I don't know about that. I've always loathed that house."

"You'll love it someday," Magneto said. He remembered the moment, on their drive back from the Clerk's Office, when Charles had pulled the van off the road, turned to him in all seriousness, and asked: _If tomorrow, everything were different, and I could go home, would you come with me? And stay this time?_ Of all the vows they'd made that day, Magneto's answer had been the most solemn of them. "You'll make it something so much better than it once was. Something transcendent."

"...Maybe. What will you do, now that you're stuck here?" Charles gestured pointedly at Magneto's wrist, which was now bare; he'd crushed the time travel device and pitched it into the sea before Charles had even awoken, unwilling to chance that his work here today would be undone.

"I hadn't thought that far." None of Magneto's other plans had ever involved him staying in the past, making whatever life he could there. He would likely never know exactly how this all had come out; he'd been ninety on his last birthday, and he felt every year in his bones. Or maybe it was just today; it had been such a long day.

He knew what Charles was going to say, the offer he was going to make, even before he turned to Magneto and said, "You can come with us. If you'd like."

"All right." It wasn't quite as enthusiastic an invitation Magneto would have hoped for, and he didn't feel the relief he'd thought he might once it was done. Instead, all he felt was—it _was_ done. He'd done what he'd set out to do. There was no changing it now. There could be no turning back.

Tomorrow, perhaps he and Charles would speak of more of the details. If they would never have what they'd had in another life, they could still ensure the future for all those who would come later. It had been worth it. He'd made the right decision. He'd done the only thing he could possibly have done. Charles would see it too, someday. He had to.

For now, Erik turned the boat back the way they had come, and neither he nor Charles spoke again, all the long ride back.


End file.
